Some television (TV) commercial broadcasts use a scheme for exposing information, such as a phone number, an Internet homepage address, and a price, at a specific location of an advertisement image for a predetermined period of time in order for a viewer or a user to request consultation about an advertised product or to order the corresponding product. Such a type of advertising is referred to as “Direct Response Advertising (DR ad)”.
Some of such DR advertisements are delivered after pieces of information about a phone number, an Internet homepage address, and a price have been changed so that, for the same commercial broadcast content, DR advertisements are suitable for the corresponding areas of individual countries or individual areas of a specific country. If, with respect to such changed advertisements produced from the same advertisement, statistical information such as the number of times the corresponding changed advertisement is delivered for each changed form can be provided, this statistical information is very useful.
Meanwhile, as methods of detecting an advertisement when an advertisement is included in a broadcast, technology such as that disclosed in the paper in the following non-patent document is known in the art.
Further, Korean Patent Application Publication No. 10-2011-0129325 (Date of Publication: Dec. 1, 2011) relates to an “Advertisement image detection method and apparatus” and discloses an advertisement image detection method including the steps of dividing each of a plurality of frames of a monitoring target image in which broadcast content and an advertisement image played on an image play device are mixed into partial blocks having a predetermined size; calculating pieces of feature information about respective partial blocks corresponding to a preset location among the partial blocks having the predetermined size; converting the pieces of feature information into a feature information vector; and comparing a feature information vector of a reference advertisement image desired to be detected, which is previously stored in a database (DB), with the feature information vector, thus detecting the reference advertisement image.
However, all of these technologies merely determine whether an advertisement previously registered in the DB is being played during broadcasting, and thus there are limitations in that it is impossible to detect direct response advertisements that induce the direct response of a user and it is also impossible to group direct response advertisements depending on their changed forms.